All posts by Alex Fay

This Wednesday, April 22 is this year’s Earth day! To get Williston in the sustainable spirit we are planning a hike, showed the Lorax this past Sunday, and will be encouraging students to wear green on Earth day. We are also hoping to give students a way to show off their sustainable accomplishments with the hashtag #willyearthday2015. If you and your friends recycle, pick up trash or do anything else that is sustainable (like using the new water bottle filling stations on campus) you can use the hashtag and tweet it at iWilliston!

Earth Day falls on April 22 every year, and is widely considered the anniversary of the beginning of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Last year for Earth Day we had also had a hike up Mt. Tom, and did some work in the garden, let’s make this year’s Earth Day even better!

This past Thursday April 2nd, marks the first Ort Report of this trimester, after we weighed and recorded the baseline in February. Many students enthusiastically embraced the Ort report, and they proudly boasted their lack of food waste. Great job guys! This week however we weighed and recorded seven full five-gallon buckets of food waste, totaling about 102 pounds of waste total. This waste was about 25.5 pounds above our baseline. Some of the extra weight may be due to the large amount of inedible corn cobs that were left over from lunch, but we still have room for improvement.

Now that the first Ort Report of the trimester is complete, we hope that students will actively think about food waste on their mind as the weeks continue. We aim to beat our minimum waste from last year of 50 pounds. Let’s make this week’s Ort Report an anomaly and start a downward trend of food waste as the trimester continues.

Keep an eye open for the Ort report and help do your part to keep our world Green and Blue!

There are some exciting things we have coming up on Williston Earth Day, which is this Thursday. Tuesday was the true Earth day, but because we don’t have classes that day we decided to make Williston Earth Day this Thursday. On Thursday at 2:45 we plan to open up the garden for the first time this spring and anyone can come and help out. Also on Thursday the school store will be offering a discount on re-usable items like water bottles, re-usable shopping bags, and re-usable mugs. This Sunday Mr. Lorenzatti will take students on a hike up Mt. Tom.

These activities will encourage people to appreciate the environment that we live in. The water bottles and re-usable items will encourage the use of more re-usable items and mindfulness of the waste we create. The hike will show people ways that we can enjoy the world we live in. All of these activities will educate people about the ways that we as a community and as individuals can make a difference. Our goal for Earth Day is to create good sustainable habits and teach people how to give back to the Earth.

The first Ort Report was this Monday and the results are in! We produced 98 pounds of waste! We are thankful for the students’ cooperation with us as we collected the food waste! There were many people with clean plates! Hopefully students and teachers continue to reduce their food waste and remain conscious of their impact on the environment!

Although we did a great job, we hope to improve in the future. The 11:15-11:50 lunch block wasn’t covered, but we will be covering that time next week. This may affect our results by making the total weight less than it should be, but over the next couple of weeks we will be developing a baseline to see how much we regularly use.

We look forward to conserving food waste on Mondays with the community!